Letter Art: K's New Room

As most of you I'm sure have noted, my kids don't have the most common names. We wanted it that way, but it makes it very tricky to find all those lovely 'name based' artifacts that kids love. There will be no pencils, magnets, badges, or sippy cups with my boys names on them, so starting with K's nursery I have lovingly made them each a set of letters for their walls. K's were originally just painted and antiqued in brown and blue, but with a new room I decided to redo his letters. I LOVE making them. I've done some for friends and family and each of the kidlets (I'm thinking of starting to sell them...anyone interested?).

They are each painted, then decoupaged in coordinating papers, then distressed (either with paint or ink, or some combination thereof), and then sealed.

Here are K's, hanging in their new location over the closet. We originally had them at the entry to his room, but his new map wreath and shelf have bumped them over.

I'm still planning on refinishing his dresser, but with sick kidlets I haven't even had time to bring the drawers downstairs. Oh well, no rush. I'll share when its done (unless, of course, its an utter disaster, in which place I'll never speak of it again, lol).

K's New Room

Ah. Four months since we moved and we are finally trying to settle in. As we do most summers, I've cancelled our tv, so we've been spending more time doing things. But in the evenings, once the kids are in bed, I've been on the computer more than usual.

I was shown this awesome website, http://pinterest.com/. Its basically a social bookmarking site (like Digg), but its much more visual. When you come across some you like, you 'pin it' to one of your boards. It will "pin" a picture from that site and it links back tot he original post. I LOVE IT. Its given me some inspiration to get crackin on some crafty diy's for the kids room and the rest of the house.

When we moved in, we were able to pick two colors of paint. Most of the house is being, but one of the promises we had to make to K to get him excited about (yet another) move, is to have a blue bedroom. So both the boys rooms were painted in a fairly dark, muted blue. They love it, but its pretty blue. Things are required on the wall to tone it down. So where to start?

I started here:

I love love love this vintage inspired boys room. Its clearly got an aviation theme, but I've got a train buff, so here we go. First project to tackle is that fantastic map wreath on the wall. I found a tutorial, stole borrowed a 1994 road atlas from my parents, broke out the hot glue gun and ink pads and got cracking.

Here's what I ended up with:

We put the shelf that I painted for K's nursery underneath, and put it all in the entry to his room. Next on the list is redoing some of his furniture. Here is a sneak a peak of my inspiration.